"We were lucky that one of our neighbours, whose son was my best friend, was displaced at the same time as us and shared the same wagon with us. My friend's father was a railwayman, so he knew his way around. Sometimes he had hot water brought from the locomotive in a bucket and coffee was brewed. Of course, we didn't get any food, we only had what someone had packed for the trip beforehand."
"We were in camp all night, sitting and sleeping on the ground. The next morning, the camp leader sorted the people who had joined the camp - some went to cut coal, others to help the peasants, the women and children stayed in the camp. One unpleasant incident happened. A German innkeeper from the neighborhood said that he could not go to the mine to cut coal because he was weak at heart. But he had better not say that, because they beat him until he collapsed on the ground and then carried him away on a stretcher. It was a terrible experience. We stayed in the camp less than a fortnight after that. In the meantime, it was getting cold and snowing heavily, so the Czech who had come to see our house could not move in. My uncle agreed with the Czech mayor that we could return home. So after two weeks we moved back home. And it was Christmas."
"One day a Czech came to our house and wanted to see our house. We couldn't do anything because everything was already nationalized, as we knew. He looked at the house and left again. And then in November we suddenly had to leave. In the evening the police came and said, 'Well, tomorrow morning at six o'clock you have to get out of here.' We could take 30 kilos per person. My mother and grandmother packed all night, the essentials. Soon in the morning a wagon arrived and we were loaded onto it and taken to a collection point at the glass factory in our village. There was a big glass factory there. From there we were taken to the camp in Rychnov. I have to say that it was not very nice, because we stood in the light rain until late in the afternoon in the area in front of the camp and only towards the evening they checked our luggage. There was a long row of tables on which they unpacked the luggage, and left and right there were Czechs standing and going through things, and finally they threw everything on the ground. From the ground we could pick up our things again."
Herbert Reckziegel was born in 1934 into a German family in Jablonec Paseky near Jablonec nad Nisou. However, he grew up in Lučany u Jablonce, where they lived outside the village and his father Emil worked in his own glassworks, while his mother Elisabeth took care of the household and the farm. A Czech family ran a grocery store in the predominantly German village and coexistence was uneventful. In 1939, father left for the German army with a six-month delay due to mother‘s severe postpartum illness. He was seen only twice during the war. Little Herbert first attended a German school, after the end of the war he had to go to a Czech school, where he liked mathematics and Russian best because it was something new. Although the family was interned in a camp, they were not deported at first because the parents were not involved in the NSDAP and the uncle was even an anti-fascist. However, at the beginning of 1946 they received news that the father was alive and in Austria, so they wanted to get to him. First, however, they were deported to Bavaria in July 1946, and requests for permission to reunite the family were steadfastly refused. In the meantime, father had built a new glassworks in Upper Austria. Eventually, the mother, two children and grandmother managed to get to Austria illegally thanks to a hunting lodge that was half in Germany and half in Austria. For the next six years, however, the family lived in a camp barrack in a former labour camp before they managed to build their own house. Two more daughters were gradually added to the family, and young Herbert did well in school, going on to military school where he studied radio technology. However, he was not very interested in this field and returned to the glass trade in his father‘s business as a glass bender and cutter. When machines replaced the manual labour of glassmakers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he worked as an accountant. He and his wife had three children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Herbert Reckziegel returned to his old country for the first time in the late sixties, and his children also went to visit Czech from time to time, but they no longer had a relationship with their old country. They all considered Austria their home.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
